Difference Between Strike and Boycott
If you follow the sport at all (or don’t even follow it), you probably noticed that neither the NBA nor the WNBA played any of the games they were supposed to play yesterday. It all started when the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play a planned playoff game with the Orlando Magic, and quickly grew into a game not played at all, and some baseball and football games are not played either.
The fact that no games happened is undeniable (and unprecedented), but there seems to be a lot of confusion about exactly what to call this sudden lack of sport. “Boycott”, “strike”, “work stoppage” and very mild “respite” have been used by workers (i.e. players), management and / or the press to describe what happened, but all of these words have very specific meanings and connotations, especially “Boycott” and “strike”.
First, it wasn’t just a “respite,” and mentioning it as such takes away from what these workers did. The postponement is something that happens due to inclement weather, and both the NBA and the WNBA (which have pledged to take action for some time now) have made it very clear that they are refraining from their jobs in response to the police shooting at the 29-year-old. Jacob Blake, happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin last Sunday.
Several players, including LeBron James, have called basketball’s absence a “boycott,” but that’s not entirely true either. (However, players may have their own reasons for using this terminology, and we’ll come back to that in a moment.)
Before we go any further, let’s go back and look at the definitions of the words “strike” and “boycott”. According to Oxford Languages , a strike is “a refusal to work organized by a group of employees as a form of protest, usually [empahsis mine]] in an attempt to obtain concessions or concessions from their employer.” A boycott is “a punitive prohibition that prohibits relationships with certain groups, cooperation with politics or the handling of goods.” To boycott something means “to refuse a commercial or social relationship with (a country, organization or person) as punishment or protest.”
These workers refuse to operate as an organized organization to protest police brutality and demand justice for Jacob Blake , making this a strike rather than a boycott. (Players don’t tell their fans not to buy tickets or merchandise from the NBA, or tell other companies not to do business with the NBA, which are just two examples of what a boycott might look like.)
So why did James and the other players call it a “boycott”? This could be due to the legality of the strike.
As with many collective bargaining agreements, the NBA has a no-strike and lockout clause that explicitly prohibits such actions. (If any of you are planning to sign a new contract soon, try to eliminate this clause!) This makes this action “insane strike”, which is technically not legal (and can have very serious legal consequences), but extremely vicious. According to two labor law experts interviewed by the Los Angeles Times , the wild nature of the strike may be the reason players have publicly used the word boycott:
“From a purely legal standpoint, I would call these crazy strikes,” said Joseph Longo, an associate professor of sports law at Loyola Law School. He is also an attorney and agent for the MLB player.
…
“I think this is a euphemism for stopping a job,” said Thomas Lenz, a law professor at USC and an attorney specializing in labor and labor law, about the players who characterized the deferral as a boycott. “When employees decide to give up their services … it’s technically a strike.”
Can the NBA sue players? Probably if you wanted to. (In my experience, bosses don’t care how you label the shutdown; you could call it a “boycott” or a “trip to Chuck I. Cheese” and they would still react as if you had hit. ) lawsuit against these workers would have looked pretty bad, considering what they are on strike. They don’t go on strike for higher wages, health care, or better working conditions; they fight for social justice and change and do not allow things in their corner of the world to continue as if everything is fine and normal.
And while the NBA issued a statement last night announcing the games were “postponed” and would be “postponed,” it doesn’t feel (at least to me) that the NBA is doing it. These are collective actions. This is the knowledge of the worker. This is a strike.
8/27/2020 2:59 PM EST: Added an example of what a boycott might look like in this story.